Charbonneau Commission: Inquiry casualties mount

Organized crime, unions remain on agenda

Justice France Charbonneau speaks to Nicolo Milioto, also known as “Mr.Sidewalk,” , who headed Mivela Construction, during the Charbonneau Commission hearings Tuesday, February 19, 2013. Justice Charbonneau called an early recess Tuesday morning at the public inquiry bearing her name, sharply asking the lawyer representing witness Nicolo Milioto to give his client a crash course in contempt of court and perjury.

MONTREAL - Alexandre Duplessis looked like he had seen a ghost.It was the afternoon of May 31, and the 43-year-old interim Mayor of Laval had just emerged from city hall to face a horde of reporters, clutching a carefully prepared speech in his left hand.

Squinting into the bright sunlight as a dozen cameras captured his every blink and tick, Duplessis planted his feet, smiled awkwardly and began to speak.

What followed was a brief and somewhat hurried address referencing “transitional solutions” and “extraordinary contexts,” but the bottom line was this: Laval would become a ward of the province. Duplessis wouldn’t be running for office again.

The ashen-faced politician had, in fact, been visited by numerous ghosts in the weeks leading up to that moment. The first was that of his predecessor, Gilles Vaillancourt, a mayor who had ruled the Laval roost for more than two decades, only to resign in mid-November amid allegations that he was neck-deep in shady deals and illegal kickbacks. Vaillancourt would come back to haunt Duplessis on May 9, when the ex-mayor and 36 others were rounded up by provincial police and formally accused of corruption. The arrests cast a lingering shadow over the city’s administration, which had remained largely unchanged since Vaillancourt’s departure.

And then there was the spectre of Duplessis’s past as a city councillor; a past that may or may not have included one or more dubious donations to his former party, PRO des Lavallois.

As the mayor retreated back through the doors of city hall that afternoon, his ghosts followed him. And a few miles south, in a hearing room on René Lévesque Blvd. W., the woman who had stirred them up and released them sat stoically, scribbling notes as she waited for the next witness to be called before her.

It has been 20 months since Superior Court Justice France Charbonneau agreed to chair a special commission of inquiry into corruption and collusion in Quebec’s construction industry.

Speaking to the media in fall 2011, then-premier Jean Charest promised that the judge — an experienced prosecutor who famously faced down Quebec’s most dangerous biker-gang leaders and won — would be provided with a healthy budget and “the powers that she believes she needs to do her work.”

She was given until October 2013 to get the job done.

That job, however, proved colossal, and what was originally intended to be a two-year exploratory exercise has morphed into a four-year behemoth slated to end in 2015 that has shaken the foundations of municipal government in Quebec — and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the months to come.

As investigators with the province’s special anti-corruption police unit (UPAC) have toiled in obscurity, Charbonneau has dragged the subjects of their criminal probes into the light, exposing exactly what it is they are suspected of doing. In some ways, the two bodies, whose mandates seem diametrically opposed and who must always be cautious not to step on each other’s toes, have become the perfect dance partners.

Duplessis, who remains in office but was rendered powerless when control of Laval was handed over to the province, is only one political casualty among many. Since the Charbonneau Commission began its public hearings in May 2012, three big-city mayors have resigned, along with a handful of officials in smaller towns. The latest to jump ship, former Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum, was arguably brought down by the charges laid against him this week by UPAC, but his demise began when Charbonneau’s investigators came knocking on his door in January.

The private sector has also seen profound shifts, with a half-dozen top engineering firm executives calling it quits after confessing their sins to “Madame la Presidente.” Codes of ethics have been redrawn, mea culpas issued and almost $1 million in cash returned to the public purse as a direct result of the commission’s work.

In early June, Le Devoir columnist Bernard Descôteaux dared to write what many Quebecers, jaded by previous failed attempts to rid the province of corruption, were secretly hoping was true: “The time for spring cleaning has arrived.”

A tale of two cities

Inside the inquiry “bubble,” meanwhile, things progressed smoothly between January and June. By the time the snow melted, a steady rhythm — the kind that develops almost unconsciously as you go about your business — had established itself at the inquiry’s headquarters in downtown Montreal. With a new crop of lawyers added to the payroll and the cringeworthy missteps of the fall session largely forgotten, the testimony trickled out in a steady and reliable stream, completing the overall portrait of collusion in Montreal and then beginning to form another for Laval.

What became apparent is that while taxpayers in both cities were robbed, the heists were planned and executed differently.

In Montreal, former mayor Gérald Tremblay saw nothing and suspected nothing until it was too late, the inquiry heard. Reports flagging suspicious patterns were lost in the mail, people were fired or suspended without much of an explanation (or any explanation at all, in some cases). And a canny fundraiser with a talent for making friends in high places collected cash kickbacks on behalf of Union Montreal in return for huge city contracts. There were whispers that it was Frank Zampino, the all-powerful executive committee chairperson and the mayor’s right-hand man, who was pulling the strings. Or perhaps it was the city’s influential engineering firms? Whoever it was, the money flowed while the price of public works projects soared, and all evidence of wrongdoing vanished in the bureaucratic morass at city hall.

Looming over the whole unpleasant affair, just present enough to instill fear, was the mob. Quietly sipping espresso and collecting his “cut” in a backroom at the Café Cosenza on Jarry St., Nick Rizzuto Sr. is alleged to have acted as a kind of mediator between the colluding construction companies — a Mr. Fix-it.

It took months for the commission to tease out these details. As Charbonneau listened, her red lips pursed in exasperation, Montreal’s witnesses squirmed and mumbled and blamed each other for the graft. There were contradictions, denials, and even the suggestion by Zampino that the inquiry’s legal team had somehow tampered with evidence.

Laval’s seedy underbelly, in contrast, was exposed with comparatively little effort — like a carpet gently unrolling across the floor at the commissioners’ feet.

After turning its attention to Quebec’s third-largest municipality in mid-May, the inquiry heard the same story over and over: City contracts were divvied up in advance, both before and after the introduction of a new law requiring those contracts to go to tender. A select group of construction companies and another select group of engineering firms were able to monopolize the market, paying a kickback of two per cent off the top of every job to the PRO des Lavallois party to protect their piece of the lucrative pie. City councillors also pitched in, donating to the party via personal cheques and then accepting envelopes full of cash supplied by the engineering companies as reimbursement. If you didn’t like how the system operated, you simply left without complaint.

At the tip of the pyramid, several witnesses said, sat Gilles Vaillancourt. With the help of lawyers, notaries, the head of the municipal engineering department and even his party’s official agent, the former mayor kept track of everyone and everything, running the city like a veritable criminal organization. (Provincial police added yet another layer of corroboration to this version of events when they charged Vaillancourt with gangsterism in early May.)

“Everyone was close to Vaillancourt, and no one was,” summarized Pierre Lambert, a notary who was given the glamourless job of collecting piles of cash in dimly-lit garages and then stashing them away in a storage unit.

And the mob? Aside from a few chilling incidents that had “Mafia” written all over them (a car bomb destroying the vehicle of a local construction boss, for example), there has been little to indicate that organized crime successfully infiltrated Laval’s construction industry.

The story isn’t complete (Vaillancourt has yet to testify), but the bits we do have form a coherent narrative, and that’s more than could be said of Laval’s neighbour to the south.

Interspersed amid all of this testimony have been glimpses of alleged collusion within the provincial transport department. A handful of former Parti Québécois and Liberal MNAs have already had their names dragged through the mud, suggesting that if and when the inquiry decides to devote an entire segment of the public hearings to provincial contracts, there could be more political fallout.

According to Simon Ruel, author of The Law of Public Inquiries in Canada and a veteran of two high-profile commissions, the question for the Charbonneau Commission will eventually become, ‘How deep do we need to dig?’

“A line has to be drawn,” he said. “But I don’t know if we’re at that point yet.”

There is, in fact, still plenty of ground left to cover. After 80 witnesses, Charbonneau has yet to really sink her teeth into organized crime and has barely scratched the surface of the province’s powerful labour unions. The slow progress is understandable given the inquiry’s torturously broad mandate, Concordia political science professor Marcel Danis said, but it may be somewhat frustrating for the average person watching at home.

“It seems to me that sometimes there’s redundancy in the witnesses, and I’m not sure why that is,” Danis said. “It’s either that they’re short of material for a period of time, or they really want to put the nail in the coffin on a particular issue. But when you consider the cost per hour of this operation, sometimes I watch and I think, ‘couldn’t they be doing something else?’ ”

Long road ahead

Now, as summer begins and people start packing for the cottage, Quebec’s favourite reality television program is once again off the air.

As it did in 2012, the summer hiatus will provide a ten-week window during which the inquiry’s team of investigators and lawyers can ready more pieces of the puzzle for public consumption and hopefully squeeze in a week or two at the beach.

It was at this time last year that the provincial Liberals decided to call an election, keenly aware that while Charbonneau slumbered, no embarrassing testimony would surface and compromise their bid for a fourth consecutive mandate. They rolled the dice and lost, but at least they had dice to roll.

Quebec’s municipal governments have no such luxury. They will be in mid-campaign when the inquiry returns to the airwaves in early September, a less-than-ideal situation for any incumbent whose name might be mentioned on the stand — even in passing.

And then there are the voters. As decades of scandal and graft continue to bubble to the surface, will they be less likely to head to the polls?

“My sense is that people are very well aware of what’s been going on (at the commission), and have been talking about it a lot,” said Scott Matthews, an associate professor of political science at Memorial University in Newfoundland who specializes in voting behaviour.

“For those people who do know, the question is: do they see the whole political system tarred with same brush, or do they identify specific actors as primarily responsible? If they see the whole political system as being cast into doubt, then there are reasons to think that turnout may fall.”

It’s hard to imagine voter turnout in Montreal falling much lower than the abysmal 35 per cent rate recorded in 2005. One thing that might turn things around, Matthews said, would be “a legitimate outsider,” a candidate who has never been named at the inquiry or investigated by UPAC, and who could campaign effectively for change.

“If the election is framed as a real choice between an old and a new way of doing politics, that’s when the stakes will be raised ... and that may excite more people to the polls.”

For Justice Charbonneau, however, the fall elections will represent nothing more than a minor distraction. By November, she and her staff of 90 will be in the middle of their autumn session and probably pumping out the first drafts of the inquiry’s interim report, due in January 2014. After that, they face several more months of hearings, hopefully tackling some key subjects that have received little attention thus far. In addition to organized crime and the unions, they must also probe the awarding of contracts by Crown corporations like Hydro-Québec.

Then comes the hard part. The writing of the commission’s final report — expected to be released in April 2015 — will be a gargantuan undertaking that could take between six months and a year to complete, according to lawyer Ruel.

“It depends if they have a report-writing process already under way,” he said. “Some commissions hire report writers, people who are in charge of summarizing evidence and preparing portions of the report. If that’s not in place, (the writing) could take much longer.”

Distilling hundreds of hours of testimony into a few hundred pages won’t be the only challenge. The rules governing public inquiries also require that the commission contact anyone who is singled out in the final report as being “to blame” for corruption and collusion in the province and provide them with what is known as “a notice of misconduct.” The person in question can then respond, citing existing evidence or making new submissions, Ruel said.

The commissioners will probably want to avoid this, he added, as it could stall the release of their findings.

“It’s going to be very tricky for them to write this ... it’s going to be delicate. I think they’ll need to use a descriptive approach rather than a finger-pointing approach to establish a basis for making recommendations.”

For now, the commission can bask in the glow of a relatively problem-free first half of 2013. The traffic on its website remained steady throughout the spring, inquiry spokesperson Richard Bourdon confirmed, with about 2,500 people tuning in to the live feed of the proceedings each day and thousands more watching on television.

Charbonneau herself has stuck to her promise not to comment publicly until the whole affair is done, but that hasn’t stopped an army of political pundits and experts from dissecting her every word and gesture. Issues of witness credibility, while still present, have been dealt with more efficiently than before, suggesting that the inquiry has learned from its mistakes.

It remains to be seen if public interest can be maintained after more than a year of testimony, but that appeared to be the farthest thing from Charbonneau’s mind on Wednesday as she formally adjourned the hearings.

“We wish you a nice, hot summer full of sunshine,” she said with a smile. “We’ll see you on Sept. 3.”

Click below for an interactive graphic highlighting key testimonies from June 17 to 20 at the Charbonneau Commission. App users: please click the link at the end of the story.

Justice France Charbonneau speaks to Nicolo Milioto, also known as “Mr.Sidewalk,” , who headed Mivela Construction, during the Charbonneau Commission hearings Tuesday, February 19, 2013. Justice Charbonneau called an early recess Tuesday morning at the public inquiry bearing her name, sharply asking the lawyer representing witness Nicolo Milioto to give his client a crash course in contempt of court and perjury.

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